Fifty-one years after his death, Ernest Hemingway is still the macho ideal for males old and young alike. Writer, fighter, lover.

As great a writer as he was, the one in the family who was really the fearless writer, fighter and lover was his mistress and third wife, Martha Gellhorn.

Gellhorn was a war correspondent and tougher than “Papa” on the front. In fact, when Hemingway was getting drunk in Cuba after stealing her gig at Colliers magazine, she was the one who stowed away on a warship to become the first correspondent to cover the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944.

HBO attempts to bring the couple’s tempestuous love story to the screen in “Hemingway & Gellhorn,” which is both terrific and lame.

Beginning just before the Spanish Civil War, the married Hemingway (Clive Owen) is in Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West when in saunters the thin and gorgeous Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) with her family. In no time, they’re in Spain covering the war (it’s her first gig as a war correspondent).

Unfortunately, this part of the movie lasts as long as the Spanish Civil War and is about as successful.

Some of the dialogue is so awful, I would have shot Hemingway and blamed it on the war. Like? “Do I need to tell you what these bastards would do to a big, creamy bitch like you in the dark?”

Hemingway, who is a cheating bastard himself, proceeds during their next few years together to do many things to the creamy bitch in the dark.

But it’s after that war is over — and the two cruelly carry on both stateside and in Cuba while his long suffering wife long suffers at home — that the movie soars.

Gellhorn died at 81 (she killed herself after going blind, according to Wikipedia). Hemingway killed himself in Idaho at the age of 62.